Executive suites

An executive suite in its most general definition is a collection of offices or rooms—or suite—used by top managers of a business—or executives. Over the years, this general term has taken on a variety of specific meanings.

The oldest use of the term "executive suites" referred to the suite of offices on or near the top floor of a skyscraper where the top executives of a company worked, usually including at least the president or chief executive officer, various vice presidents and their staff.

That use was then applied not just to the physical space but also to the people who occupy the offices and their immediate underlings, much like the White House has come to mean the Executive Office of the President of the United States or 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister's Office. A quote from the Ottawa Sun in 2003 shows this use: "The Montreal Canadiens are fading in the Eastern Conference playoff race, but there is no panic in the executive suite."

The term was used by writer Cameron Hawley for the title of his 1952 book Executive Suite, which was later turned into an Academy Award-winning movie with the same name in 1953 and a short-lived T.V. series in 1975. A 1982 computer game was also called Executive Suite.

An executive suite can also be a set of individual offices sublet from a larger suite of offices. The executive suite proprietor rents entire floors (or buildings) and leases the smaller office spaces or workstations to businesses that don't need, or can't afford, large space. Some executive suite landlords offer additional services. This variation on the traditional office idea has become an industry with roots in the early 1990s. There is no universal agreement on terminology as executive suites go by many different names, such as: open plan office, serviced office, office business center, office suite, business center, executive office, furnished office, flexible office, managed office, shared-office space and hoteling. Office suite, as software, stands as testament to the confusion in the terminology. It is not uncommon for a traditional tenant to sublet unutilized space and to characterize it as an “executive suite.”

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